Hello and welcome to Libero, the podcast about the most important of the least important things,

as Torben Peasynick once said. I'm Rory Smith of The Observer of Many Blazers,

and today I'm joined by Tarrett Panger of the New York Times, and Midell Delaide, of the Independent.

How are you both? Nice week off for international rent. Miguel, is that just a few days?

Peace and quiet for you now?

No, I'm back home in Ireland. My niece's birthday would have some work to do. I'm not going to England, Wales, though. But I'm going to Latvia, England next week. It's the big one. It's the big one. Marion Pahas playing? Stepping off as well, yeah, yeah. I'm sure our Latvian listeners will be delighted with such references.

We can actually find out if we've got any listeners in Latvia, but I would assume they wouldn't be Latvian. I think they're probably English people who live in Latvia. One thing that people don't know about Medell Delaney is he's a very devoted uncle. He might be the most devoted uncle I've ever known. It's a rare soft side to delay me.

Tariq, have you had to do an interview only embattled presidents?

Is that what you're spending your time doing?

Not this week. However, I will be, yes, but it's the European Club Association meeting in Rome.

So, few embattled presidents there. I'm going to go there for a couple of days,

meet some of these guys. Usually, Daniel Levy was a big presence there, speaking of embattled figures, but no more. Asley, to be fair, I missed a Sedway there. Does you're also quite a devoted

uncle, aren't you? Correct. Yes, I was doing some of that this weekend, but I would say

Miguel wins out, because he has to, like, travel quite a long way for his devotion.

So, one-nil Miguel.

Whereas you just pitch up. Now, I know what people will be thinking, which is that we've got Miguel, we've got Tarrett. this might be a sports politics episode about FIFA

and they might be considering going to listen to Gary Neville and Roy Keen

talking about, hard to say what they'd be talking about,

probably the culture of Manchester United in the 1990s and why it's better than today. But don't worry, because today we are talking about actual football, about Liverpool, late goals and the mountain body of evidence that it's all gone a little bit eridivis at Anfield. Midd, you were at Chelsea on Saturday, where if people don't know, Liverpool lost 2-1, their third defeat of the week following the losses at Crystal Palace and Galatasaray. It's a full-blown crisis. If you were a doctor of football, which I suspect is a thing that some people are, and you were looking to diagnose the reasons for that defeat at Stamford Bridge,

what would you say? What's your prognosis? There's a lot, but the weird thing was in the game,

Liverpool probably created enough chances to win it, or at least enough openings to win it.

If the Liverpool individuals, particularly some of their best players, were on the form they were in eight months ago, they possibly win that game quite comfortably.

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